New Fitness Apparel Will Sport Sensors and Microchips

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A new breed of fitness apparel equipped with flexible sensors and
microchips for measuring overall physical health­—
everything from heartrate and blood pressure to joint injuries—
could be less than two years away.

The thin, stretchy electronic patches for the new athletic gear
are being developed by mc10, a Cambridge, Mass., company that has
teamed up with
Reebok.The idea is that you won’t have to buy devices to
monitor your body on the move if the
sportswear itself contains these electronics.

“Products that require you to buy gadgets that you then carry
around with you are not as appealing as a
product where you can get the information you want and it's
in something you already own,” said Gilman Callsen, mc10’s
co-founder.

To create
electronic clothing, mc10 modified computer-chip-making
processes to create mesh-like sheets of miniaturized sensors and
microchips. Instead of etching these devices using acid, as is
usualin chip manufacturing, the company developed a type of
imprinting process where a soft, rubber stamp picks up “ink” made
up of tiny sensors and microchips and then stamps it onto a
material such as a sheet of aluminum foil. The sensors are 10
times thinner than a strand of hair.

Mc10’s creations wouldn’t be the first sensor-embedded fabrics on
the market. For example,the MyZeo headband, which claims to help
measure sleep
quality,uses embedded silver fibers to observe brain
activity. But a key difference is the mc10 fabrics wouldn’t have
to connect to a separatecomputing device to make use of the
signals gathered from a wearer’s body.

“What we would do is to — for as much of the product as possible
— [is] have that sensing and active computation take place in the
[clothing] itself instead of on an off-board rigid package,”
Callsen said.

Reebok and mc10 are keeping the details of their tech-ified
apparel under wraps. But mc10 says consumers can look forward to
things such as leggings embedded with accelerometers for
measuring run distance; tight-fitting shirts for heart-rate
monitoring; and fabrics that measure hydration and temperature
(to alert the wearer of dehydration and heat stroke).